


The Boy Who Loved Science, the Scientist Who Loved

by MalcolmInSpace



Category: Magic School Bus, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: AU, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 04:37:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3882571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalcolmInSpace/pseuds/MalcolmInSpace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos waits for Cecil in the Desert Otherworld and thinks back to the lessons of his childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Who Loved Science, the Scientist Who Loved

Carlos, perfect Carlos, stands on the shoulder of the impossible mountain and surveys the vast, impossible desert otherworld. High above him blinks the red light, slow and implacable in its devotion to saying yes, here is a mountain. The mountain does not require your belief or your acknowledgement. The mountain does not care that you fix your eyes to the ground and deny the concept of elevation in unremembered fear of a day when people came to a barren land from a different land and glimpsed shadows moving behind hilltops. The mountain does not care. The shadows walk among you anyways, hooded and ominous. Carlos, perfect Carlos, stands on the shoulder of the uncaring mountain and the hot, dry breeze sweeping up from the desert floor ruffles his perfect hair into a new and yet still perfectly, adorably untidy mop.

Someone is coming across the desert. Someone who is not one of the giant, masked army nor the stranded residents of Night Vale. Someone new. Someone who has willingly, gladly set aside all taboos and bylaws and whispered invocations to broach the Dog Park and cross an infinite, recursive desert otherworld. Carlos smiles. He knows who it is. His heart beats a little faster, his eyes glow a little brighter. The empirical, unequivocal, scientifical evidence of love.

He begins to walk down the mountain, noting as he does the absence of all the normal stories in the rock, tales of vast empty time and incomprehensible pressure and heat and movement, the stories of a planet. Instead there are the suggestions of other stories, stories Carlos, perfect Carlos, cannot read, cannot know.

Not yet.

But there is always more to the story, Carlos remembers that. He remembers some things but not others, but he always remembers the science, and the lessons. Night Vale is a town of wonders and horrors and someday the science will help Carlos know which is which, just as it did when Carlos was small. Because that is the truth of science: there are no horrors, only wonders you cannot yet see in their true, quantifiable, categorizable beauty.

There is a science to love, too. It follows all the same principles and heeds all the same rules. Carlos remembers the first rule, the one he heard again and again as he learned to see into the tiniest spec and the vastiest dark of the night sky. Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy.

And then there is a meeting and a hand and a face and lips and a voice saying the other thing said so often, said the same but different.

“Oh, _Carlos._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> This occurred to me while watching MSB with the kids. It makes a lot of sense...


End file.
